Reme, Thank you for bringing this new service to our attention. OA policies ↵
are vitally important to the development of institutional repositories, and ↵
services that can highlight and bring attention to this development can be ↵
valuable.
There are a few aspects of the validation aspects of the new MELIBEA service ↵
that confuse, and possibly trouble, me. The first is the main indicator, ↵
%OAval, which is the most visible result for a policy. What do you expect this ↵
will tell people about a given policy? I randomly selected a couple of ↵
policies, one of which was for my own school, to find they each scored about ↵
50%. I would expect these to be among the leaders in terms of OA policies, so ↵
this seems a surprisingly unhelpful score.
So what's the explanation? Note that the objects being evaluated are ↵
institutional OA policies; they are effectively being presented in relation to ↵
institutional repositories when the policy specifies where to archive is an IR ↵
with a URL. It seems that the scores include ratings for OA publication policy, ↵
libre vs gratis OA, publisher pdf, sanctions (score if Yes), incentives (score ↵
if Yes), etc., some of which an institution might specify but which might not ↵
apply to an IR http://www.accesoabierto.net/politicas/politicas_estructura.php.↵
However you weight these factors they are still contributors to the overall ↵
score, so a policy that is specific to an IR is immediately handicapped, or ↵
appears to be unless there is more context to understand the scores.
Which leads me to another question on the visualisation of the validator, and ↵
its use of green, gold (and red) in the meter. Do the green and gold refer the ↵
the classic OA colours? This would be quite convenient, since it would appear ↵
that the green repository policies I mentioned above are achieving almost full ↵
scores in the green zone of the meter. However, I suspect this cannot be the ↵
case, because it would assume that institutions must have a green AND gold ↵
policy, but not simply gold (whatever argument could be put for that).
It is important that new services should help reveal and promote OA policies, ↵
as you seek to do, but at the same time not to prejudice the development of ↵
such policies by mixing and not fairly separating the contributing factors, ↵
especially where these relate to different types of OA.
Steve Hitchcock
IAM Group, Building 32
School of Electronics and Computer Science
University of Southampton, SO17 1BJ, UK
Email: sh94r AT ecs.soton.ac.uk
Twitter: http://twitter.com/stevehit
Connotea: http://www.connotea.org/user/stevehit
Tel: +44 (0)23 8059 7698 Fax: +44 (0)23 8059 2865
On 15 Jul 2010, at 08:14, Remedios Melero wrote:
> Good mornig!
> In the last Open Repositories Conference which was held last week in ↵
Madrid (http://or2010.fecyt.es/publico/Home/index.aspx ) was presented in the ↵
poster session the project called MELIBEA.
> MELIBEA (http://www.accesoabierto.net/politicas/) is a directory and a ↵
validator of institutional open-access (OA) policies regarding scientific and ↵
academic work. As a directory, it describes the existing policies. As a ↵
validator, it subjects them to qualitative and quantitative analysis based on ↵
fulfilment of a set of indicators ( ↵http://www.accesoabierto.net/politicas/politicas_estructura.php) that reflect ↵
the bases of an institutional policy.
>
> Based on the values assigned to a set of indicators, weighted according to ↵
their importance, the validator indicates a score and a percentage of ↵
fulfilment for each policy analyzed. The sum of weighted values of each ↵
indicator is converted to a percentage scale to give what we have called the ↵
“validated open-access percentage” (see how i t is calculated: ↵http://www.accesoabierto.net/politicas/default.php?contenido=acerca ).
>
> The types of institution analyzed include universities, research centres, ↵
funding agencies and governmental organizations.
>
> MELIBEA has three main objectives:
>
> • 1. To establish indicators that reveal the strong and weak points of ↵
institutional OA polices.
> • 2. To propose a methodology to guide institutions when they are drawing ↵
up an institutional OA policy.
> • 3. To offer a tool for comparing the contents of policies between ↵
institutions.
> The aim is not to be a ranking, but to offer a tool where to aanlyse and ↵
visualize the weaknesses or strenghts of an institutional OA policy based on ↵
its wording. It seems something trivial but accomplishment of a policy is ↵
based on its terms.
> Please if you detect any mistake or you would like to make a comment, ↵
contact me. I will be pleased if you could check your policy, if any, to ↵
analyse our approach.
> Best wishes
> Reme
>
>
> R. Melero
> IATA, CSIC
> Avda Agustín Escardino 7, 46980 Paterna (Valencia), Spain
> TEl +34 96 390 00 22. Fax 96 363 63 01
> E-mail rmelero AT iata.csic.es
> http://www.accesoabierto.net
>
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Steve Hitchcock
IAM Group, Building 32
School of Electronics and Computer Science
University of Southampton, SO17 1BJ, UK
Email: sh94r AT ecs.soton.ac.uk
Twitter: http://twitter.com/stevehit
Connotea: http://www.connotea.org/user/stevehit
Tel: +44 (0)23 8059 7698 Fax: +44 (0)23 8059 2865
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